About: LinkedIn has really taken off in the past few years since being introduced as a professional networking site in 2003. It now boasts 80 million users. The site has become very popular with HR and recruitment professionals as it enables users to view CVs, place job ads and share information in online groups.
Users are able to create a CV on their profile page, download a photo and ‘link in’ to colleagues, recruiters and mutual contacts.
The site also offers a LinkedIn Answers feature, similar to Yahoo! Answers and allows users to post questions and blogs for their community to answer. The Human Resources UK group currently has over 2,800 members who can post questions on anything and everything from where to get the best CIPD qualification to managing difficult colleagues.
Advantages:
- Gives you instant access to a large database of CVs and allows you to place job ads
- You can create or contribute to groups and make connections with people in them
- Users can follow you as an employer and get notified when vacancies are available
- You can view the connections of people with interesting CVs and find others working in similar fields
Disadvantages:
- The number of recommendations a person has may be misleading. Some people recommend each other as a favour or in the hope of receiving more recommendations themselves
- Profiles may be misleading or out of date as some users only update their page when looking for a job
- You may end up receiving a lot of spam
Uses in HR: Of all the social media tools, Linkedin is best known for its recruitment benefits.As with Facebook and Twitter, users can follow different employers and get notified when they have vacancies available. As an employer, you can post jobs and look for candidates all in one place.
LinkedIn is also a good tool for networking. Users can build up a network of direct connections and extend their network to include connections of existing contacts (second and third-degree connections).
Coming soon:
Linkedin have announced they will be adding two new products to help businesses find and recruit high-quality "passive" candidates.
One will be a referral engine- allowing companies to generate applicants from people in their employees' networks.
The other is 'Jobs for You Ads', which distributes job postings to both passive and active candiates and allows companies to pick their audience based on data from LinkedIn profiles.
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